Unthinkable
by bk.jeong.14
Summary: What once seemed like heroism has turned out to be an even greater evil. And now a drastic solution is needed. Even if it means the start of a practice that rivals the Holocaust for sheer horror. The Heartland War is about to begin-the result of manipulation from the world of the dead.
1. Prologue: Epiphany

_The realization had come out of nowhere._

 _For some time, she had played with the idea that what she did was just as bad as what she prevented by doing it. But now it seemed that idle thought was actually reality. Not only did she cause a problem, she didn't know to stay around to fix it._

 _So she now prepared to jump off the tower. It couldn't be more pain than what she was in now already._

 _How could she have been so stupid? How could she have not known what would happen? She had too much faith in humanity. If only she knew. But it was far too late._

 _There was no reason for her to live. She didn't deserve it, certainly not when she had unwittingly instigated her own doom, and caused something worse than the end of the world. She was fully prepared to go to hell for this. Her existence was already hellish enough._

 _Yet even when her despair was at its greatest, the basic instinct for life held her back from the edge. Hadn't she suffered enough? She had already lost both of her love interests, her daughter was most likely murdered, and that did not even begin to mention the horrors she had seen, and been through. Her memory included everything from cessation of existence to being trapped in an endless cycle to cruel and unusual ways of being tortured and killed. The injuries and many deaths she could relate to included many unspeakable methods of mutilation, far too many to list._

 _She was alienated by the very ones she had saved. She was facing an unstoppable problem that she herself was responsible for._ _And now, just when she was about to escape from a life worse than death, she couldn't._

 _The irony of it all was that most of what made her life hell were people who hated her, maligned her, and wanted to kill her. If she died, they'd get what they wanted. Of course, it would backfire later, but she wouldn't win._

 _And even though she knew her self-preservation instincts were too powerful for her to allow death, that was an even worse option. An existence of eternal suffering, cleaning up the messes she would inevitably leave behind in the process of cleaning other messes. It would be a closed circle that would never be broken until the end of existence._

 _And now, it seemed that was her only option. She wasn't about to be killed, and that same bond was keeping her form killing herself._

 _But then it told her something else._

 _It told her to turn pain into passion, hatred into power, and her troubles into her strengths._

 _It would never lessen her pain, but she'd get some consolation from seeing judgement rain down on others, and she'd put an end to what had been down to her. Because if she didn't, everyone would lose._

 _She went through more pain than anyone else alive. She'd return it where it came from._

 _She would be the bright blade of justice._ _And this time, she was wise enough to know what actually was justice._

 _She would be vengeance incarnate._

 _—_

20 years later

 _It had been two decades since she had abandoned suicide. During that time, she had found a purpose for her pain and despair. It was negative, not positive, emotion that drove her to her goals._

 _Yes, what she did over half a century before was an utter disaster._ _And it was the result of saving the human race._ _She didn't regret that decision, but if only she had thought ahead about what would happen afterwards, the world could be a much better place._

 _Too late for that, but even if the ounce of prevention was gone, the pound of cure was still there._

 _So she began to prepare for a drastic cure._

 _Even if that cure was deadly._

 _And she was now ready to put the formula into action._


	2. Part I: Daughters of Deception

Part I: Daughters of Deception

 _Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition._

-Timothy Leary

It took them four years to defeat the villain. They had stopped an great evil. But in the process, they unknowingly caused another. They didn't realize what they were trying to protect was itself something to be abhorred.

Only one of them would ever know the full scale of the aftermath. It was her ambition and her secret doings that allowed her to know the truth. She was nearly driven to suicide by this revelation. But she would be led into a different, though even darker path. It required her to make the greatest sacrifice possible for a human-exchange death for something much worse, an eternity of pain.

But despite knowing the full cost of her exchange, that was the trade she made. And from that day on she would spend each waking moment plotting, strategizing, trying to conjure up the vision of a complex gambit, and writing list after list of things to be done. And at last, it was there.

As always, however, she would have to watch her back constantly. Others would be coming out of the woodwork. They would have their own agendas. And they would be just as unfettered as she was already.

The war for the future had begun. It would not be a war of violence, but one of subtlety where the most devious schemes would win the day.


End file.
